"Zach Hughes - Gold Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

"I don't know. A dream."

She sat down in the other command chair, turned it on its swivels to
face him. "Was your dream something like a signal gong going of!?" Her
steel-gray eyes were on his.

He felt a little shiver go up his back. "You heard something, too?"

"I'm not sure. I'm like you. I could have dreamed it."

"Honey, I love you, but when we start to dream the same dreams at the
same time I'm going to wonder if such closeness is possible."

Pete pushed buttons. Since the incoming-signal light was not on he had
not checked the tape for the sleeptime period. He put the audio on
high-speed search and there was a whirr of sound and a hum of motion
and then a little click and there it was.

The sound was weak and incomplete. The tone, however, was that of
the warning gong. The sound lasted a fraction of a second and then was
gone. He played it back four times, then did a high-speed search of the
entire four hours of tape.

There was only the momentary hint of sound, almost a ghost of a
sound. He turned the problem over to the computer and had an analysis in
seconds. The sound had the tonal qualities of the communications
warning gong. It lasted microseconds. The signal which had activated the
gong for that brief moment, so brief it had not reached standard volume,
had come from that section of the detection equipment which searched
for the pre-arrival signal of a blinking ship.

"Just a glitch," Jan said. "A ghost."

"It came from Number One," Pete said. For brevity, they had numbered
the four intersecting blink routes so that in referring to them they would
not have to use the full, lengthy chart designations.

It worried him. A tiny microsecond signal had come through the far
reaches of empty space which stretched back and away down the blink
ranges toward home.

Only one thing in the universe was known to be faster than the
instantaneous travel of a blinking ship. Perhaps more research had been
done on that phenomenon than on any other aspect of the blink mystery.
A blinking ship sends a signal ahead of itself. The signal is unlike any
known emission. As far as man knew, that particular signal, that flash sent
toward the emergence point at the moment of generator activation, had
not existed prior to the first use of Billy Bob Blink's machine. The
pre-arrival signal could be detected along the entire length of the